Loss Quotes

There is a widespread sense of loss here, if not always of God, then at least of meaning.

~ Charles Taylor

In other words, I was a moderately happy penguin who was occasionally attacked by sadness.

~ Takuji Ichikawa

The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

~ Mitch Albom

Yes, I've lost him. But I don't have to lose myself.

~ Lenore Appelhans

I thought of all the hardships and people that I had lost in the past few days alone, but, most of all, I thought of how I didn't regret any of it.

~ Shannon A. Thompson

It makes the other one more precious and also not enough. We have to try to fill not only our own boots but other people's too - yours, Leo's, Dad's. We have to expand at the moment we feel the most shrunk.

~ Rosamund Lupton

Mother (fragment)...You asked me if I would be sad when it happenedand I am sad. But the iris I moved from your housenow hold in the dusty dry fists of their rootsgreen knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.Were it not for the way you taught me to lookat the world, to see the life at play in everything, I would have to be lonely forever.

~ Ted Kooser

The burnt-off connectors and shadows where Ravan once filled my spaces— those, I think, are the sensations of grief.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

He sank to his knees, absolutely full of despair and sadness. For a long time, droplets of blood continued to fall into his lap.

~ Phillip W. Simpson

I always wondered what it must be like to lose a twin—if somehow Mary felt it like it was happening to her. If she felt physical pain.

~ Francesca Lia Block

I see you in the grass,Running through the snow,But where you have gone,I cannot go.

~ Helen Pearson

He felt something trickle down his face and he wiped it away irritably. When he looked at the back of his hand, he found trails of red. He had never cried in his life; in fact, he could not cry with no tear ducts. But now, at last, he was. He was crying tears of blood. For her.

~ Phillip W. Simpson

She looked so disappointed, so grieved and desperate that Clem longed to comfort her, only he couldn't think of thing to say that she hadn't heard a hundred times from Dad and Dr. Snow and Mrs. Mack: how things would get better in time, though no one knew how much time, and that life might be a little better for her and Jess once school began again.

~ Judith Clarke

We are like children building a sand castle. We embellish it with beautiful shells, bits of driftwood, and pieces of colored glass. The castle is ours, off limits to others. We’re willing to attack if others threaten to hurt it. Yet despite all our attachment, we know that the tide will inevitably come in and sweep the sand castle away. The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.

~ Pema Chödrön

I am ashes where once I was fire...

~ George Gordon Byron

I found that the only way I could control this sorrow was not to think of [it] at all, which was almost as painful as the loss itself.

~ Robin Mckinley

A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. That’s how awful the loss is.

~ Jay Neugeboren

...and when I lift my head to scream out my fury, a million stars turn black and die. No one can see them, but they are my tears.

~ N.k. Jemisin

You have to understand what you’re missing before you can really feel a loss.

~ Jodi Picoult

My heart broke when he died, split in half and fell down into my stomach or somewhere deep and muddy, and I'm still not sure where it is now. I hear it beating sometimes in my ears, or feel its fast pulse in my neck, like I do now; but in my chest, where it should be, it mostly just feels empty.

~ Jen Violi

I wish I could take my brain and put it inside your head,” Winslow said. “Just for a moment. Then you’d know what all I can’t find how to say.

~ Alan Heathcock

This wasn't the first time that I'd come close to death, but it was the first time I'd been involved in this part of it, this strange, terrible saying goodbye to someone you've loved.

~ Madeleine L'engle

We knew what we had and what it meant, and though so much had happened since for both of us, there was nothing like those years in Paris, after the war. Life was painfully pure and simple and good, and I believed Ernest was his best self then. I got the very best of him. We got the best of each other.

~ Paula Mclain

I wandered off, walking through streets that seemed emptier than ever, thinking that if I didn't stop, if I kept on walking, I wouldn't notice that the world I thought I knew was no longer there.

~ Carlos Ruiz Zafón

I believe that our world was created with a sense of order. For every loss, there's a gain. Sometimes we're so blinded by the loss that we don't see the gain, don't recognize the gift.

~ Debbie Macomber

The moonlight rained down on the beach as if to shine a spotlight on my solitude, and I wanted to cry out at it, ‘Why did you take her? You, surrounded by all of your twinkling stars and infinite wonders and darkness. There’s already enough beauty where you are.

~ Rachael Wade

I realized, it is not the time that heals, but what we do within that time that creates positive change.

~ Diane Dettmann

I still want to feel you against me.” Her gaze dropped to his hands. “I want you to stay with me. Hold me. Just tonight. If I lose you again tomorrow then it will still be worth it. I will lose you a hundred times, if you would but hold me in your arms each time before my loss.” She saw his eyes water, but no tears emerged...

~ B.c. Morin

Never dreaming, was I, poor Jack Duluoz, that the soul is dead. That from Heaven grace descends . . . No Doctor Pisspot Poorpail to tell me; no example inside my first and only skin. That love is the heritage, and cousin to death. That the only love can only be the first love, the only death the last, the only life within, and the only word . . . choked forever.

~ Jack Kerouac

Suppressed grief suffocates, it rages within the breast, and is forced to multiply its strength.

~ Oivd

When nothing becomes the vocalThen nothing becomes the focalAnd nothing’s becoming at all

~ Kate Kaiser

Loss makes the soul sick

~ Laurie Alice Eakes

He felt like his own heart might stop beating just from acknowledging the concept. The sadness, the sorrow, and the loss, they were living things, funnily enough.

~ Adam P. Knave

Every man casts a shadow; not his body only, but his imperfectly mingled spirit. This is his grief. Let him turn which way he will, it falls opposite to the sun; short at noon, long at eve. Did you never see it?

~ Henry David Thoreau

There is no place for innocence on the battlefield.

~ Jocelyn Murray

Sardar Harbans Singh passed away peacefully in a wicker rocking-chair in a Srinigar garden of spring flowers and honeybees with his favourite tartan rug across his knees and his beloved son, Yuvraj the exporter of handicrafts, by his side, and when he stopped breathing the bees stopped buzzing and the air silenced its whispers and Yuvraj understood that the story of the world he had known all his life was coming to an end, and that what followed would follow as it had to, but it would unquestionably be less graceful, less courteous and less civilized than what had gone.

~ Salman Rushdie

And then there's the truth beyond that, sitting like an old rock under green creek water: none of these things matter. Right now, in this moment, we have love. We have it in the sound of my daughter's laugher, in Mom's and Georgia's locked fingers, in the warm pressure of J.T.'s hand. It will leave, and it will come again, and when it does I'll give up everything and take it. Just like an addict. Like dry grass in new rain. It's not something I'm proud of necessarily. Then again, maybe I am.

~ Katie Crouch

Suddenly the memory of his wife came back to him and, no doubt feeling it would be too complicated to try to understand how he could have yielded to an impulse of happiness at such a time, he confined himself, in a habitual gesture of his whenever a difficult question came to his mind, to passing his hand over his forehead, wiping his eyes and the lenses of his lorgnon. Yet he could not be consoled for the death of his wife, but, during the two years he survived her, would say to my grandfather: “It’s odd, I think of my poor wife often, but I can’t think of her for a long time.

~ Marcel Proust

How we respond to grief can shape our present

~ K.c. Rhoads

Even as I hold you, I am letting you go.

~ Alice Walker